Some of these are already here! Click the photo above to see a larger image.
After Festival of Quilts, I needed to reorder the ever popular cotton tsumugi stripes. This cotton is slightly heavier than regular patchwork cotton, about 141/2in inches wide and is still made for "everyday" kimono, although it is mostly used nowadays for patchwork and other crafts in Japan. Tsumugi has a slight slub to the weave, a characteristic of this kind of fabric (there are also silk tsumugi and wool tsumugi, which I also stock - it just means the fibre is spun, not reeled, as in the case of the silk). I use these fabrics for bags, for patchwork and for sashiko, where I'm wanting to use a stripe to line up the pattern. They wash and wear very well indeed. Preshrinking is something I recommend for all my Japanese kimono cottons - just steam them with a hot iron- as occasionally (though not always) they shrink very slightly over their length.
As I was trying to restock in time for Great Northern Quilt Show, there wasn't much time for the bolts above to arrive, so I had them sent to Stockton-on-Tees. Predictably, half of them arrived on the Monday after the show finished, but I will be collecting them in mid October, ready to take to the Malvern autumn quilt show.
Other striped tsumugis ordered yesterday (from a different suplier) include PURPLES! - unusual colours in tsumugi, so I am so happy to have tracked some down.
These new tsumugi cottons will be £7.50 per metre. There has had to be a small price increase as the prices in Yen have increased while the exchange rate Yen - £GBP has become much weaker than last year (the £ is worth only about 75% of last year's rate). Previously, the price hadn't increased since about 2005.
